This is good working within the established specs.
IMAP almost does what we need, but not quite. What we really need is a
mechanism that makes it really easy to add an IMAP mailing list
subscription into an email client or Webmail interface.
I am currently logged in to my gmail account reading the IETF
Discussion Mailing List.
Seems to me that if the mail messages come with a header that says
'available in IMAP form', then it would be really easy for Google to
offer me the choice of a one click subscription to access the IMAP
version.
This would save them about 7Gb of mail storage for me. Multiply over
the thousand members of the IETF and we have saved a whole hard drive.
Multiply over the population of Gmail users and we have saved:
* A huge amount of bandwidth.
* A huge amount of storage.
* A huge load on the spam filters and the worst of the corner cases.
Yes, it would probably take a little more than just a button. In
particular we have the issue that there is a mailing list account and
there is an email account and they both have credentials.
And it might just be that IMAP isn't the best mode for retrieval for
this use case. But this is the way to solve the problem long term.
We can even put JSON curly brackets and some crypto in place.
On Sat, Aug 30, 2014 at 11:31 AM, Russ Housley
<housley(_at_)vigilsec(_dot_)com> wrote:
The IAOC sent out an RFP for review by the IETF community last June. The
RFP can be found here:
https://iaoc.ietf.org/documents/IMAP-Service-RFP-2014-06-16.pdf
We have received bids, and questions were sent to at least one of the
bidders. I expect an award to be made soon.
Russ
On Aug 29, 2014, at 6:03 PM, Nico Williams wrote:
The IETF should run an IMAPS server for it's lists. Preferably users should
be able to get accounts for the purpose of read/replied/... flag state
keeping, but if truly read-only, users could just fetch IETF list emails
into local stores.
Also: provide a subscription option that allows posting but does not deliver
any posts to the subscriber.
If spammers start gathering email addresses from this service, then require
an account and let only subscribers to at least one IETF list have that.
I know there exists an RFC about this. Let's just do it.
This will solve the some/many-posts-appear-as-spam problem for at least
those users who can get access to (e.g., firewall exemption) this service
when they need it.
Also, i find the archive views awful. I'd rather we have the traditional
mailman archive view plus something more akin to a read-only web forum for
those sad sad people who prefer web forum interfaces to mailing lists. For
the saddest users maybe also write-only web forum.
Only semi-facetiously yours,
Nico
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